The Metamorphoses of Titus

The Workers part i

Hapu leant on his end of the saw. The right side of his back ached as always. It seemed hours since they had had their midday break of coarse bread and a pot of leeks and onions while the midday sun had scorched its way overhead. The dust from the light sandstone they were cutting settled in a cloud on the harder, yellower sand of the desert floor. He coughed. Meha looked at him, worried, from the other side of the large block of stone. They had set themselves a target of 2 square cubits of stone that day and were behind. The overseer would be back any second and they didn't want him to see them slacking as they needed a good report to be included in the message to the king that day. And anyway they were keen to complete this was new pharaoh's city of love and return to their homes and crops.

Around them activity like bees making honey. And noise. The sawing of course but also the creak of the cranes lifting the stone as the sinews of rope stretched and strained. The ache of wood also as the blocks were worked slowly down from the quarry on rollers.

'Careful there, you'll crush us'

'Just keep it coming, slowly now'

'Not too fast, for the sake of all the gods'

'Don't speak like that. We work only for Aten now. 'The old habits, with the best will in the world, were difficult to break'.

'All right but we must have our twenty blocks down at the cranes by sunset'.

There under the cranes and in the shade of the a wide hanging drape the cleaners worked, chiselling and polishing the stone until it shone as like as they could make it to the granite it was not. Then the cranes would lift the blocks onto carriages pulled by oxen from where it would be lugged north.

The water drawers passed and offered them a goatskin of the precious liquid to drink.

'Over here, you bastard. Don't waste your time on those slackers'

Hapu took a gulp and emptied the cool liquid over his head and shoulders then quickly passed the half full skin over the rock to Meha who took a long swig and handed it back to the carrier. No one knew where the precious liquid went. The sweat dried on their backs before it had time to cool them.

They got back to their work, sawing with regular strokes to the rhythm of the chant that lay over their labours from morning to night; the rhythm of thousands labouring together on a master project; the new city which was going up beyond them to the north. Their blocks of sandstone were easily cut. A pair like Hapu and Meha could cut twenty a day and there were a hundred other pairs working in the quarry. Sunup to sundown. It was now midsummer and the work never ceased or slowed and the days seemed to endure for ever. The very sun that their pharaoh was lauding in his temple was also the light by which they rose and for them it meant long hours of toil to fulfil what the great inscriptions say about the honour of the work and the rewards they would reap in the afterlife. A good rest would be nice and some of that wine they never tasted from the vineyards above Memphis, the wine that the god pharaoh drank under canopies that shaded him from the sun he adored and worshipped and which beat down on their backs as he rode past inspecting the progress of the work.

So distant he seemed even when he alighted from his chariot and came over to see their labours at close quarters. It was certain that he could not have done the work he watched with such keen interest. They could see him pointing and speaking to those around him. He was smaller than any of them and seemed to lean somewhat to one side. The rich cloth that he wore only served to emphasise the smallness of his body and its thinness. Even his face was long and narrow, his nose and chin pointed, his cheeks sunken below prominent cheekbones. The centre of their world, the centre of the world, so little, so weak.

He kept somewhat apart from them at first as if afraid to have his majesty touched by their presence. He looked around at the small group of dignitaries who had come with him, at the bodyguard and the new priests and the women. He raised his hand to the cloudless sky and the aching sun above the canopy they held aloft to protect him from its rays. He pointed at the priest beside him, his little finger raised from his little hand, like some puppet pulled by other strings, and then he moved forward, away from his little group of retainers, the canopy holders struggling to keep him in the shade, towards the workers who soon surrounded him with their sweat and bad breath. He stood in their midst and lifting his hand to the heavens, intoned, 'Let not evil creep into your souls, my wonder workers, let not the slacker come between you and your work, let the life of the Aten glow upon you in your labours and keep at them with all your heart and all your might and with all your soul for this great city depends on you and the Aten depends upon the city and I upon the Aten. I will prey that your hands and your hearts work well and that the end will come from your wills'. He stopped. A special prayer for them, his builders, that had come from that elegant child's head and seemed strange as if proceeding from quite another place. Strength born out of weakness. He stood still a moment as if lost, then made his way back as they parted to let him pass. Then, helped by a plump priest at his side, he stepped back into his palanquin and was carried off.

They also stood a moment before resuming their work, their tedious repetitive movements that he had turned into a labour under the heavens in quite another way. For a moment he had stepped out of his world and into theirs, something unknown for such as he, and shown that his heaven and theirs were in no way different, both open to the love of his new god. They knew they had been called and had come and had thought it an honour, not really understanding that they were destroying the very inheritance those structures represented. And now they were stuck under the hot sun until the work was complete however exhausted it made them. As had those other labourers under the same sun who struggled for those earlier pharaohs following their fathers and their grandfathers into the quarries and up the ramps to the summits of the greatest structures in the world. By the grace of this god, however, their children might be spared and the work was being quickly done with inferior materials so that the city might be ready for the new age with no lash on a slaves back. So was it had been ordered and so it would be done.

And truly his god was a great god. Hapu and those working the stone around him knew this better than the pharaoh in his distant cool halls. Truly it was heavy and unrelenting under this dry sky of Egypt, a land where the water was carried down in a yearly flood in the great river from Nubia and not from the sky as in the countries further north of which they knew nothing other than tales the travellers told of rain and cold winters.

There, if you look, you may find my soul, there in the place I love most, the little circle of brick and adobe huts. It was there I drew my first breath and there I would like to breathe my last. There the sky is so much higher and the air thinner, more difficult but better to breathe There the nights are cool and we could sleep on the roof with the family. There is a memory, one of many before . . .